Hi, I’m Katy Thorn and I’m a 6th year graduate student in area VII. After getting my Master’s with Roger Mark, I started working for Ann Graybiel in the McGovern Institute/BCS department, and currently hope to graduate in about a year. My research involves doing electrophysiology recordings in awake behaving rats in an effort to figure out how their little brains work (and perhaps how our big brains work). But what does that have to do with EECS? I hear you wondering. On the one hand, not much the day-to-day of training rats is really not very electrical or engineering-y. On the other hand, analyzing electrophysiology data is basically signal processing and I spend quite a bit of time thinking about how the brain might implement supervised learning algorithms and other such fun things.

Outside of lab, I just got my black belt with the MIT Tae Kwon Do club. I started climbing about a year ago, mostly indoors, but hopefully outside more once the weather gets warmer. And I just recently started taking guitar lessons at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.